Time Plains Drifter Read online

  “Beating the rebellion out of me was only secondary to curing me of being half Mexican,” he explained.

  “And how did he intend to ‘cure’ you of that?” Jenni asked indignantly.

  Rafe flashed her a teasing grin. “The rod was Father Ignatius’ remedy for all things.”

  She nodded, looking away. “That’s why you don’t speak it much.”

  Rafe propped up on his elbow and looked down at her. “Old habits die hard, Jenni. Father Ignatius was a brutal man. He did...unspeakable things—sins that God Himself would have trouble forgiving—” He broke off abruptly, his voice turning steely. “And he paid for it in the end.”

  “How?” Jenni swallowed hard. But before Rafe could say it, she already knew. “You...killed him, Rafe?” There was no accusation in her voice. Only her sweet acceptance and understanding, and it was enough to nearly undo him.

  He retreated to the cool, aloof manner that had always given him the upper hand in any kind of battle; the methodical resolve that had always been his strength.

  “It was him—him, or my brother, Cris.”

  She waited for him to go on. He didn’t want to. God, he didn’t want to. This was part of his life so abominable it could hardly be spoken of; yet, he knew it was what he needed. He was still wounded, scarred from that, more than the raised flesh of his back pained him.

  “Cris and I were always together,” he began in a low voice. “He was only one year older. When I was nine, Cris ten, our parents were killed in a...riding mishap. My father owned a vast acreage of rich land. He and my mother—they were...very much in love.” Rafe didn’t look at Jenni as he spoke. He couldn’t afford to let his composure slip—and he’d never told anyone about what had happened.

  “The priest...” he hesitated, then, “Father Ignatius was also in love with my mother.”

  Jenni’s eyes widened and she carefully rolled to her side, placing a hand on Rafe’s ribcage. He didn’t notice, as he continued.

  “He arranged the riding accident, only...my father was the one who was supposed to be killed. As it turned out, they both died. I suppose it made Father Ignatius especially angry that our lands reverted to the church—that he never had the chance to finish what he’d set in motion. Neither Cris nor I were old enough to take up the reins and run the place—so, the church stepped in and took it. We knew we’d never get it back. We were hustled off to the mission school—right into the killer’s hands. We were damn lucky we survived the three years we stayed there.” He shook his head and fell silent.

  “Did he try—” Jenni began, finding it hard to complete the question.

  Rafe nodded, lost in thought, remembering. It was almost incomprehensible, even all these years later.

  “One night, I awoke in the darkness, feeling as if something was...wrong. Cris was gone. He’d disappeared completely. I knew I had to find him. He was depending on me, and I knew, somehow, I had to find him quickly. That he was in terrible danger.”

  Rafe’s eyes were looking back through the years, at the horror he had witnessed as a child.

  “There were secret tunnels under the mission,” he murmured. “Hardly anyone knew they were there—but Cris and I, being young boys, knew where everything was. We were born explorers, always courting disaster.” His expression became anguished. “I can’t explain it, Jenni, but I just knew that’s where Father Ignatius had taken him. I raced down the secret stairway in the darkness—I’d forgotten to get a candle—and found myself hurrying through those tunnels just like it was full daylight, like I’d done it a hundred times. By the grace of God, I ended up right where Father Ignatius had taken him.”

  Jenni traced soothing patterns over Rafe’s taut copper skin as he spoke.

  “There was a small room at the far end of the tunnels. When I got there, the priest had Cris tied to an altar. He was going to sacrifice him. The knife lay behind him on a sacred robe...it glinted in the dim light, like evil itself...

  “My heart was pounding so hard I thought it was going to come out of my chest. Cris saw me, but he didn’t show it...he kept the priest talking, babbling about how Cris was such a good boy to—to volunteer...” Rafe’s voice dipped, then stopped. He swallowed hard.

  “He agreed...said he’d go when the priest came to our room, because Father Ignatius told him if he sacrificed himself, I would never know. I would be allowed to stay at the mission—even though we carried ‘tainted blood’—and—” Rafe rolled to his back, staring at the ceiling, “and he would never beat me again,” he finished tonelessly.

  Jenni bit her lip and slowly laid her head on Rafe’s shoulder.

  He knew she was waiting to hear the rest. He would tell her. He just needed some time.

  After a few moments, he said, “I picked up the knife and I stabbed him in the back. I–couldn’t quit once I started. The blood was spraying—just like it would when he beat us— All I could think was ‘I’ve killed a priest. Done murder. But...it is a good thing.’ I cut Cris loose and we left Father Ignatius lying in the floor, his blood pooling all around his so-called sacred robes. I was twelve years old, and I’d killed my first man—a man of God—or so I thought in my childish mind. We—Cris and I—lived in hell for the last three years, there at the mission. We ran away, to a place...not far from here. Never went back to the mission. It wasn’t until Cristian explained everything to me, including the fact the priest boasted to him he had killed our parents—that he’d been in love with our mother—that I could begin to forgive myself. To heal.”

  He shifted to look at Jenni’s upturned face. “That’s why I don’t speak the language...why I don’t talk about the past. The future is what we have to look to, Jenni. You and I—we have no past.”

  ~*~

  Reverend Bolton said a long and earnest prayer over Kip before he took his leave. He told Elizabeth he’d be at the mission house that evening at the revival meeting, should she need him. His meaning was clear.

  Should Kip worsen...and die.

  Elizabeth nodded and thanked him quietly, closing the door behind him as he made his way down the hall.

  Lance and Cash stood at the stairway railing, watching the comings and goings below in the bar. Neither of them mentioned the unimaginable incident that happened earlier between Beck and the Gambler. And neither of them expressed any desire to go back down and join the crush of boisterous people below.

  “How is he, Reverend?” Lance asked as the gangly preacher approached them.

  The preacher stopped and gave Lance a piercing look through hawkish brown eyes. “He is in God’s hands.”

  Cash gulped and stood stiff and rigid. “You mean...he’s—dead?”

  Reverend Bolton shook his head. “No, son. Not dead. But there’s something mighty strange at work here.” His gaze held both boys pinned against the rail. “Do you want to talk about it? I might be able to help if I knew more about the circumstances of his...injury.”

  Lance and Cash looked at each other and nodded, their secret was apparently too heavy for boys their age to carry.

  “Is there someplace we can go to talk, Reverend?” Cash asked, his voice nearly breaking as he spoke.

  The preacher nodded. “Tell Miss Elizabeth you’re going with me to the mission house. It’s just a few doors down. Mr. Jansen might wonder where you’ve gone.”

  ~*~

  Gentle fingers lightly traced the ugly red scar at Rafe’s waist.

  The Bowie had gone in deep, and yet...

  Rafe came awake in the darkness, and knew instantly what Jenni was thinking. He didn’t need any kind of extrasensory powers to recognize it, either. He could tell by the way her hand kept returning to the rough edges of skin that should, at the very least, be held together by stitches. Still oozing blood.

  A knife wound that serious—and that recent—would have laid him up in bed for at least a week, if he was human.

  What was he? Jenni was wondering, he knew, here in the darkness. The slow song of the rain lulled them as if the
y were adrift on a sea of dreams. But Rafe knew better. Dreaming was not his to do; not anymore. He had no claim to anything now—not his life, as it was, nor the dreams of what might be.

  He finally opened his eyes. He had actually been sleeping, he realized. Fleetingly, he wondered if Beck was aware of everything he did. A smile quirked his lips as Jenni’s hand strayed lower. He drew a deep breath, felt the hesitation before her fingers stroked his cock, then held. He released a sigh of mingled contentment and desire.

  “What are you, Rafe, if you aren’t alive?” Her voice was soft, but there was no censure or doubt—only wonder. “Are you—an alien?”

  Rafe idly played with a strand of her hair, but stopped abruptly at her question, as if waiting for her to continue. When she didn’t, he asked, “What do you mean—an alien? Is this a word used in your time?”

  “You know,” she said, rising up on her elbow to look at him in the dim light, “from another planet. From the stars. Not from Earth.”

  He shook his head slightly, and Jenni could see the amused glimmer in his black eyes that slowly faded, turning serious and thoughtful. He didn’t speak right away. Finally, “Where do you think I’m from, Jenni?” There was a careful precision in his tone.

  He was feeling his way with her. His earlier words coupled with his hesitance to make love had made her wonder, he knew.

  Jenni gave him a slow, questioning smile. “A place where wounds heal extra fast—where men don’t need to sleep or eat—where finally finding love is heaven—and being untruthful is hell.”

  He made no reply, but his fingers clenched the length of hair he’d been playing with earlier.

  “Am I right, so far?”

  He didn’t answer, only brought his other hand up to pull her down against him. What he had to say would be easier if he wasn’t looking into her face when he did it. He wouldn’t be able to watch the trusting innocence turn to incredulous disbelief, followed swiftly by the anger that was certain to come.

  “Yeah. You’re right.”

  Jenni lay against his shoulder. The deep timbre of his voice was comforting to her. Whatever he had to tell her was so difficult for him, but he was determined to do it. And once it was out in the open, Jenni knew her practicality would take over and they’d find a way to overcome it.

  “Rafe,” she murmured quietly, “Reverend Bolton said... ‘You are safe inside this room, with the beings who dwell within these walls...and I got the feeling he was talking about—”

  “About?”

  Jenni took a deep breath. “Angels...maybe?” She slowly rose up on her elbow again, feeling his sudden tension at her suggestion.

  His gaze bored into her, searching, asking. Yet, the answer to her question was also there, plain to see, even in the darkness.

  He moistened his lips, and after an interminable silence, he asked, “What now?”

  “I’d like to hear—how...and why.”

  He passed a hand over his face, let out a shaky sigh.

  “Share it with me, Rafe. Please.”

  “I don’t want to lose you, Jenni.”

  She reached to smooth the dark, tousled hair away from his forehead. “That will never happen. There’s nothing you can say that would make me leave you. Nothing.”

  He cast her an uncertain glance, then she watched the resignation enter his expression.

  “Earlier, you asked if I trusted you. I do, Rafe. Whatever you tell me, I’ll accept. That’s...not easy for me either. But we’ve got to build this trust—a bridge—between us. The bond between us is there, darling. It’s unbreakable. I want you to look inside me and see the love. It’s strong, Rafe; stronger than anything else. I will never doubt you. No matter what.”

  “My story is pretty unbelievable, querida. I—hardly know where to begin.” His voice was rough with emotion.

  “At the beginning,” she teased gently. “Start with...how you–became an angel.”

  “How I died, you mean,” Rafe clarified bluntly.

  “Yes,” she whispered, settling herself beside him once again where she belonged. “How you died.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Reverend Bolton nodded somberly and leaned back in his chair, surveying the two boys who sat across from him, on the other side of his desk. The story they’d spun was fantastical—but not unexpected.

  Murdoch Bolton had, in his long-standing experiences as a minister, seen many unusual things. He had known from the moment he’d come to pray for their compatriot that something was different about their little band.

  Time travel. He’d never fully let his mind wrap around that concept, and he was still having a bit of trouble with it. It was a fascinating idea, though, and one that he had a smattering of knowledge about. His sister, Mrs. Irma Nesbitt, had sent him a book about it earlier that year, The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells, a personal friend of hers and her husband’s.

  When Lance and Cash had described what had happened in the saloon, Bolton was even more convinced that, indeed, there was a true purpose that they’d been flung backward in time more than a century. There were otherworldly forces at work. He already knew that; he felt it when he entered the room and prayed over the boy. No, it was before that, when he first laid eyes on Becket Jansen. When he said the prayer over Kip, he knew. The words he chose were right and fitting. Jansen, and to a lesser degree, d’Angelico, were representatives of Good—of Light. He believed that their Dark equivalent wasn’t far behind them.

  Good and evil were both, evidently, alive and well. In thirty years of preaching, he’d never been so relieved. Or so afraid.

  ~*~

  “You won’t find what you’re looking for holed up in this room, Josiah.”

  The voice awoke Kemp from a deep, dreamless sleep. At first, he’d thought he imagined it. But when he opened his eyes, he saw that, much as he’d hoped it was his mind playing tricks on him, the Dark One was, indeed, with him.

  Milo hovered beside Kemp’s bed, three feet off the floor. He’d changed his appearance again, but Kemp would recognize that silky voice anywhere.

  “Hey,” Kemp grumbled as he sat up and rubbed his eyes. “I was sleepin’!”

  “Josiah, how many times must you be told those types of activities will make you weak!” He shook his auburn mane of hair, his green eyes smoldering.

  Reluctantly, Kemp rubbed his eyes again.

  “Can you fade?”

  “Fade? You mean disappear?”

  “Yes, Josiah,” the impatient voice muttered. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “Well, sure, I guess. I mean, I did it before—when I was watching their camp that morning—” When was that? Just yesterday?

  “Yes, just yesterday,” the demon answered Kemp’s thoughts. “And do you suppose you can still do it?”

  “I—I don’t know.” Kemp stood up and paced to the window. “Why?”

  Milo took a deep breath, then stood down on the wood floor soundlessly. With exaggerated patience, he said. “Because, my dear Marshal Kemp, if you can fade, you have the advantage. You can hear and see and—do—without being seen. Makes sense, n’est ce pas?” He disappeared, then reappeared at Kemp’s elbow.

  Kemp jumped back, startled. “God!”

  Milo’s brows knit in an unpleasant frown. “That, Josiah, is one word we never utter, without ‘damn it’ attached. Do you understand?”

  Kemp gave a shaky nod.

  “Do you have any idea where d’Angelico is right now?”

  “No.”

  “He’s on his way to Fort Sill. He’s after the boy—Joel—to bring him back here. Seems he got a wild hair up his ass to join the cavalry.”

  “So?”

  “Lots of similarities, Josiah. Think about it. Your name and his—Josiah and Joel; your penchant for keeping law and order—” his eyes roved scathingly over Kemp, “when it suits you.” He smiled. “And his, for becoming a military man. Maybe he’s the one we’re after—your great-great-grandson.”

  “Maybe.” Josiah wet
his lips nervously, his hand going to the nape of his neck. “Could be any of ’em. Right? Even one of the girls, eh?”

  “Tell me you aren’t getting soft, Josiah,” the demon purred, bringing his face close to Kemp’s. “Oh, do tell me you are not going to swing the other way and try to protect this— cub. That would be most unwise.”

  Josiah raised his eyes to the cold fire in the furious green gaze, and his spine tingled.

  “I had such hopes for you. Now, I wonder. I do hope you won’t prove to be a disappointment.”

  Kemp shook his head slowly.

  Milo smiled his most brilliant smile and clapped Kemp on the back. “Good, Josiah. Now, what say we work on your...’disappearing act’?”

  ~*~

  With gentle fingers, Rafe drew Jenni back to his shoulder. He thought he could do it now; unfold the tale of the train robbery, his own death, and those of the others. It would never be easy to speak it, but for tonight, at least it was possible.

  “It was October twenty-fifth, 1879,” he murmured in the dark stillness. “A Friday...”

  In wooden, detached tones, he told her the story of his betrayal, his death, and the deaths of the others he had somehow felt responsible for.

  His words were slow and measured, his tale told in a lifeless voice that spoke to Jenni of the isolation, illustrating vividly the lonely exile of his present existence. Taken too soon from the life he enjoyed by a careless mistake somehow on Beck’s part, now he was here again only to play whatever role he was needed for in the rescue of one of Jenni’s students from his or her own great-great-grandfather. As far as he was concerned, Josiah Kemp’s descendant was probably pretty deserving of whatever happened to come his—or her—way, he muttered. There was a saying that was fairly accurate: the acorn never falls far from the tree.

  Jenni shook her head at that. “I don’t believe that, Rafe. I think people can change—even if they’re bad. I think—” She broke off and bit her lower lip, unwilling to continue.

  Rafe stroked her hair, loving the feel of its softness against his fingertips. “You think what? There’s some good in everyone? That maybe if Kemp’s mother had been a better parent he wouldn’t have turned out crooked as a dog’s leg and mean as a snake?” His voice took on a harsh tone of defensiveness.